I like to write about movies of all sorts: old and new, good and bad, mainstream and obscure, local and foreign.
Warning: some articles in this blog may be offensive to fans of James Bond, Jean-Luc Godard, and Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris.

Monday, 18 April 2016

Introducing Space Week!

Back in January, I decided to try and get back into action by establishing a "theme week." The idea was pretty straight forward: it was based on finding a theme in advance and then scheduling it so that
I would have to watch one film each day and find something to write about it. The first of these was War Movie Week, where I set it up so that I was covering a different war each day; beginning with Paths of Glory (World War I) and ending with Edge of Tomorrow (future warfare). A week later, I also managed to do a similar project related to crime films, this time covering a series of very different movies each based on a different type of crime.

Both themes turned out to be remarkable successes, in that they were well-received by my readers and I managed to find lots of interesting things to say about the individual movies. So with the huge success of both War Movie Week and Crime Week, it should hardly be surprising that I was interested in revisiting the idea in the future. My original plan was to run this during Reading Week back in Feburary, but unfortunately a few things got in the way and I ended up postponing it. Fortunately, today happens to mark my last exam of the year before I get into that difficult period when you're initially relieved to have finished all your exams only to then get stuck when you realize you now don't have much to do.

This time, I've decided to move away from the previous themes and try something entirely different. This time, we're going to shift focus to exploration. As you are no doubt already aware, one area I'm extremely well-versed in is science fiction, plus I've studied basic astronomy (you'd be amazed how useful that can be to film analysis) so that would make sense for a theme. Now I had a few ideas for how to organize this, but I'm going to break up this activity into stages. My initial idea was to do one film for each of the planets in our Solar System, but finding movies for specific planets (other than Mars) is tricky, so I have instead broken up the adventure into stages, each one focused on a different step in space exploration. Similar to before, I will be doing one randomly picked movie each day between Tuesday and Friday based on the established themes and trying to write about each.

Choosing the themes was a bit difficult. My original idea was to have Thursday be "exploring the galaxy" and Friday "Beyond the Infinite" but in order to better fit the week I've had to change it. So now the focus will mainly be on our own Solar System, with the possibility open of a bonus on Saturday if everything goes okay.

Now with that out of the way, here is the official schedule for the week:

Tuesday: Looking Out﻿

Wednesday: Entering Orbit

Thursday: The Inner Worlds

Friday: Jovian Bodies

As usual, feel free to leave recommendations for each of these categories in the comments.